You hit on the key with "they don't spend a nickel...".It is so cheap, and they can blast it to so many millions of email accounts over and over, even if they have only a .5% or less return rate, it still makes money! I'm IT director for a small university with several hundred PCs and servers on my network - it has been a constant battle keeping machines clean from being "hacked" and turned into spam producing generators. Also - our state run Internet provider was putting some improved spam rules into place a few months ago... Next thing you know - spam dropped VERY dramatically across all my users. I assumed they had come up with a very effective filter and was feeling pretty good, until I read a news story about a big earthquake in the Pacific rim area that knocked much of southeast Asia offline from the USA Internet. That is what really caused the huge (temporary) drop in spam!! My point is partly that a lot of it comes from people that are so impoverished or desperate or willing to do anything to make a living, that MUCH of it comes from overseas... (see a relationship with the online scams for purchasing tractors and high-dollar items??)
Howard
| 
